Capterra

LiveBall Customer Video

Capterra shows why they love LiveBall by building out a complete landing page experience in 38 minutes.

Citrix Systems

556% Increase in Conversions with Landing Page Optimization from ion.

Paid search pays off in the tough-to-crack enterprise healthcare market.

With ion’s post-click marketing services, Citrix can easily deploy online campaigns, track results and modify campaigns in real-time to optimize our spend while providing a consistent, flexible framework for click landing experiences.
Diane Kalmanowicz
Director, Web Marketing, Citrix Systems, Inc.

Click on the image above to see more landing page examples.

background

With over 180,000 customer organizations, Citrix Systems is the global leader in access infrastructure software. Citrix provides secure, easy, instant access to business-critical information at any time from anywhere. Their marketing efforts require a similar level of immediacy.

synopsis

ion helps Citrix to achieve increased online conversion rates in a narrow target market with online conversion optimization, reallocating media dollars to realize greater ROI.

challenge

In 2005, Citrix launched a paid search campaign to generate leads for the company’s compliance solutions for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The search campaign directed respondents to a topic-specific minisite that resulted in a 0.5% conversion rate.

In 2006, two factors led to a shift in the campaign strategy. First, feedback from the Citrix inside sales team was that the campaign was generating poor quality leads. Next, Citrix determined that decision makers in hospital purchasing were the most qualified prospects—a much smaller subset of the healthcare industry than previously targeted.

objective

The objective of the new campaign was to target hospital-purchasing decision makers and generate qualified leads at a higher conversion rate than the original campaign with the help of landing page optimization.

solution

The challenge was that the paid keywords generating the traffic were not hospital-specific. The new campaign needed to “weed out” respondents who were not part of the target audience, and hit decision makers with messaging that was specific to their hospital’s size and needs.

ion created a message-matched set of post-click marketing conversion paths with segmentation to direct respondents down forks based on the size of their hospital.

results

Based on post-click marketing segmentation analysis—conducted in real time—Citrix immediately learned that more than 70% of respondents were not in their target audience of hospital decision makers.

Even with only 30% of the respondents in the target audience, conversion rates still soared 556%, based in large part on the directed paths, audience-specific messagingand landing page optimization.

Within 10 days of launch, the ion RTP matrix (Respondents/Traffic sources/Paths) revealed that respondents from Google were better qualified and were converting at a higher rate than respondents from other search engines in the media buy. By week three of the campaign, the budget was moved entirely to Google.

The campaign launched with A/B testing of two test paths. Immediate real-time analysis revealed that path A was performing significantly better than path B. Based on these results, path C was crafted and launched with nearly double the effectiveness of the already highly successful A path. The C path converted at a rate 756% higher than Citrix’s original campaign and segmented over 40% of respondents. This segmented traffic converted at a rate of 12%, almost 2,500% better than the original campaign.

Based on these results, paths A & B are being phased out and a D path was crafted to improve the C path results—all within three weeks of the initial launch of the campaign.

Construction Data Company

Reaching Lead Generation Nirvana:
Quantity and Quality 

ion interactive’s services team helped us strategize how to best implement a holistic optimization – really a redesign of our lead generation program – with LiveBall as opposed to an optimization of only a certain part of the process. 

Guy Colangelo
Marketing Director, Construction Data Company

background

Construction Data Company (CDC) is the leading regional provider of both public and private commercial construction leads, with three brands (CDCNews, BidTool, and DataFax) each servicing different regions in the Eastern and Midwestern United States. CDC has been a trusted lead source for general contractors, sub-contractors, construction equipment suppliers and manufacturer representatives for more than 30 years.

the challenge

The CDC marketing team maintains a culture of testing and data-driven decision making, and as long-time LiveBall customers, they already had a multifaceted landing page program in place. Their first goal using LiveBall was to maximize lead generation efficiency, bringing as many leads to their sales force as possible. As lead quantity increased, CDC shifted focus towards evolving their online marketing strategy to also improve the quality of the leads handed over to sales. They knew that in order to find the perfect balance between lead quantity and quality, they were going to need bring together their PPC, landing pages, and email efforts into one holistic strategy. 

the solution

The first step in improving lead quality was for the CDC marketing team to determine what was important to their visitors and which pages engaged their highest quality leads the most. Since CDC had been using the LiveBall platform for several years, they already had a plethora of data and analytics at their disposal, which revealed not only what converted well, but also which combination(s) of body copy, imagery, and ad text attracted their most qualified prospects. Thus, CDC was able to leverage existing LiveBall data to perform a self-audit and optimize their landing experiences for higher quality prospects. 

Once the CDC team had perfected their messaging strategy, it was time to integrate the message with their post-click marketing portfolio. The CDC team was familiar with ion interactive’s services team from their initial adoption of LiveBall, and knew ion’s landing page optimization experts could help figure out the best way to implement their new strategy using LiveBall.

CDC’s marketing team shared their goals with ion, and received an updated framework that included a new feature called Ready Made Widgets to help them improve lead quality. Ready Made Widgets help LiveBall users add and customize interactive layered content like accordions, image rotators, and tabbed content to pages without code or development resources. These widgets made it possible to add more content to a page without the page feeling overcrowded, giving the CDC team the creative flexibility to display highly-targeted content that their most valuable prospect segments could interact and identify with.

The CDC team also created a series of new microsites that used both the tabbed content and image rotator Ready Made Widgets to communicate the unique value that CDC offered to each of their prospect segments. Similar to the new landing pages, diverse visitors could self-identify and self-segment by clicking on a particular tab or image and then view a value proposition that spoke directly to their needs. These value propositions were discovered using the existing LiveBall data that CDC had originally cultivated and analyzed, and were shown to consist of highly-targeted, convincing, and effective messaging and imagery.

Next, CDC wanted to test both the length and manner in which forms were displayed, and the effect of using two-step forms on both conversion rates and lead quality. Two-step forms are shorter, and thus recommended in certain cases to remove user fatigue and boost conversion rates. However, CDC was concerned that a boost in conversion rates may be related to diminished lead quantity and a low-quality conversion overload.

Previously, CDC used a one-step form and considered any visitor who converted on that form to be a “sales-ready lead”. Now, the first three fields on that form (name, email address, and state) are presented separately in a step one form, and any visitor who converted on that first step became a marketing lead. Marketing leads could be added to a nurture or drip campaign, and given the opportunity to view valuable content and complete their profile. Those visitors who converted on the first step and then followed-through to convert on the second step were considered “sales leads” and were sent straight to the sales department. 

results

The CDC marketing team had originally hypothesized that dividing their registration form into two steps would increase the number of marketing (step one) leads, but decrease overall sales-ready (step two) lead generation. To their pleasant surprise, CDC discovered that while the number of marketing leads did indeed increase, the total number of overall sales- ready leads remained equal to that of their control. This meant that CDC’s marketing team was able to glean a new list of marketing leads from pay-per-click campaigns without sacrificing sales-ready lead quantity, quality, or adding to cost. Many of these marketing leads are also converted daily into full, sales-ready leads, lowering CDC’s overall cost per lead and improving not only lead gen efficiency, but also lead quality. Recent testing has also resulted in dramatically improved lead quality without diminishing conversion rates, which average over 16%. 

what’s next

CDC is focusing on optimizing and improving the lead funnel. They’ve begun testing a 3- step form, complete with an enticing call-to-action to ‘skip the line’ and speak immediately with a sales representative. The content of these forms and associated pages has successfully shifted the mindset of CDC’s prospects from an offer to a value orientation, which results in a pre-qualified call. With approximately 57% of CDC’s sales leads completing the third step, CDC’s marketing team is driving more and more high quality leads every day. 

Dell

LiveBall: A Key Catalyst to Dell’s Global Market Success

[LiveBall] was a key enabler in our online lead gen strategy that resulted in a 10X increase in opportunities for our sales teams in a two year timeframe”

Josh Mueller
Senior Manager of Business Digital Marketing, Dell

background

Dell is a multinational technology corporation that provides technology solutions, services and support.

the challenge

Dell’s Business Digital Marketing team needed a better way to create and globalize custom online lead generation pages. Prior to adopting LiveBall, each new landing page was a multi-faceted project that required several hand-offs: First, Dell would create an IT roadmap, then work with a design team, provide the schematics, get the page coded, and finally transcribe or translate individual pages for each language or region included in the campaign. On average, it took about six to eight weeks to customize and globalize a lead generation form. As a result, the opportunity for the campaign often passed before the form was fully globalized.

the solution

Dell began using LiveBall for their lead capture forms in September 2010.

They started with the page templates that are included with LiveBall, but it wasn’t long before they realized how easy it was for them to create and test their own custom templates without coding or help from IT.

Not only did it take less time, but also Dell was able to speed up the globalization process by giving the regional marketing managers access to LiveBall. After a page was created in one country, the other regional managers could simply sign in, copy and translate the existing lead gen form, and further customize the page for their particular region.

Dell Senior Manager of Business Digital Marketing, Josh Mueller, explained that one of the greatest benefits of using LiveBall has been the decrease in production time, “I can literally have my team here in the States put up a page, email it to my team members in Japan, China, France and Germany and then a couple days later it’s localized and out on the web.”

results

The creation and optimization process that used to take Dell six to eight weeks now takes two to four days with LiveBall.

At first, Dell was only sending Dell.com traffic to LiveBall pages. However, when their first LiveBall page produced a 78% lift in conversions after only two weeks, they couldn’t wait to do more. Dell now has well over 1,000 LiveBall pages running on Dell.com, in their communities and on third-party properties globally—serving everything from gated whitepapers and videos to basic contact forms.

The results that Dell saw in their first two weeks using LiveBall haven’t slowed down. By using LiveBall to further test and optimize their lead generation pages, Dell has seen basic contact form completions rise 50% and on their dedicated landing pages they’ve seen increases as high as 300%.

Needless to say, the other Dell divisions have caught on, and LiveBall is now employed by multiple divisions throughout the company.

the next step with forms

Dell plans to create even smarter forms by integrating LiveBall with Demandbase.

Using LiveBall’s hidden form fields and respondent information from Demandbase, LiveBall will then automatically customize forms and landing pages based on the user. If, for example, a web hit arrives from an IP address that is associated with a company in the healthcare industry, LiveBall can automatically show a form customized for that industry.

Dell is also integrating LiveBall with Eloqua. After a customer’s online behavioral data captured on a LiveBall page, it can be reliably shared with Eloqua, enhancing the profile of the customer and driving appropriate communication between Dell and the online visitor.

more than just forms

When Dell acquires companies, they acquire their marketing systems and everything that they’ve been doing. One significant benefit of using LiveBall for Dell is how easily it integrates with other software platforms. Dell is using LiveBall to bring everything together.

Dell’s projects with LiveBall aren’t limited to simple pages and forms. They have launched numerous campaign-specific microsites including one for a large multi-million dollar US brand campaign. 

DHL Express

LiveBall Landing Page Technology Customer Video

Going from a very low conversion rate to as much as nine percent, now, has really made a difference in our ROI

Rolf Inge Holden
Global Marketing Specialist 

DHL is an international leader in courier, express and parcel delivery services. The company operates in over 220 countries and territories, and specializes in providing customers with customized transportation solutions from a single source.

DHL Express’ Global Digital Marketing Specialist, Rolf Inge Holden, came to ion interactive with the need to manage and optimize hundreds of brand-consistent landing pages. When Holden first adopted LiveBall in 2010 he deployed the software to marketing departments in fifty countries. Based on the results he saw in those first fifty countries, Holden started rolling out the software to more areas where DHL has a presence.

Today DHL has used LiveBall to create landing pages in over 220 countries and territories in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

The video is of Holden talking about his experience with LiveBall. It’s not an ad we paid him for, and it’s not from a script we gave him. But we think it states the benefits of LiveBall, perfectly.

DHL LiveBall Video Transcript

Rolf Inge Holden:

“What’s so great about LiveBall is that we can now create campaigns in a matter of a minutes by setting up A/B tests. We can always ensure the best possible outcome of a campaign. The templates-based system lets marketers in DHL create web pages without worrying about any HTML coding. It’s a code-free zone that’s very intuitive and easy to use.

DHL Express is the market leader in international express deliveries worldwide. We’re present in more than 220 countries and territories, providing our customers with the fastest, most reliable, door-to-door deliveries in the market from one day to the next. For DHL, it’s important to reach new customers, as well as engage our existing customer base in order to grow our revenues. Online campaigns are an essential part of that, and this is the first time I’m able to track results with such an amount of detail and precision. I’ve always had to rely on agencies to help me set up campaigns and online experiences. Now I do this myself.

We’re currently using LiveBall in 50 countries in the Americas and Europe, and we’re seeing some amazing results. Going from a very low conversion rate to as much as nine percent, now, has really made a difference in our ROI. Fifty countries are now working with the same tool, this means we have total visibility of results and can learn from each other, reusing the best demonstrative practices across the countries. When managing a global brand such as DHL Express, brand consistency has always been important. Together with ion interactive, we’ve developed a set of DHL specific templates that gives us great flexibility, yet, ensures that consistency. LiveBall is a powerful tool for marketers in DHL, and we’ll be able to do things we never done before.”

Global Manufacturer

Launching Multilingual Custom Landing Pages in Minutes

Offline media drives traffic to single- and double-byte language, high-conversion landing experiences

I’m a usability person myself. LiveBall is neat, usable and well thought through. It lets us focus on the marketing and on the experiments — on the what rather than the how. We’re now turning around landing pages in any language in 40 minutes. That’s down from four weeks before LiveBall.

The real power is in the templates. I was planning to create pages in German. Instead, I ended up calling my colleague in Germany. About 15 minutes into my explanation of LiveBall she asked if she could just use it herself. I gave her access and she had made her first conversion path an hour later. We’re empowering teams around the world that are in close touch with their markets. It lets us focus on the marketing and on studying the behaviors of respondents instead of pages and code — the process stays out of our way.
Confidential Client
Web Marketing Specialist, Multinational Manufacturer

background

A multinational manufacturing conglomerate with strengths in government, commercial and military markets was seeking a global B2B lead-gen solution.

This company, which remains nameless at their request and due to the sensitive nature of their industries, has global reach and needed multi-lingual landing experiences with language and database support for single- and double-byte characters.

The company uses global print advertising to drive traffic to download topic-specific technical white papers. This activity takes place at the top of their lead-generation funnel and marks the start of a long, complex sales process.

Prior to enlisting ion’s LiveBall post-click marketing platform, our client procured landing pages as part of the service provided to them by their advertising agency.

challenge

The company’s global print advertising campaign’s call to action is to download a white paper. The challenge is that the call to action can be ‘Download White Paper’, but it can also be 下载白皮书, Download-Weißes Papier, 다운로드 백지, ダウンロードの白書, and many more.

The company needed to quickly and efficiently create localized landing pages in English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Turkish, German, Italian and many more languages. Once it became clear that their previous solution couldn’t deliver professional market-specific pages, they sought a solution that could. They found ion’s LiveBall post-click marketing platform.

solution

The client licenses LiveBall — ion’s post-click marketing platform — as the cornerstone of their in-house landing page solution. They use LiveBall to create, test and analyze international landing pages and conversion paths. The platform is used by a global, far-flung team of online marketers. World-class landing experiences are produced in many languages — both single- and double-byte and localized for markets from Turkey to Australia, and from the United States to China.

A Web Marketing Specialist at the company says “I was in a bind and drawn to the pages and the analytics of LiveBall. We need double-byte language support in the pages, the forms and the lead database. LiveBall gave us all of that and a lot more. The advanced reporting makes it easy for me to take a one-page summary and send it to my colleagues. We’re using the data to make decisions on campaigns going forward.”

He goes on to say “LiveBall turned out to be so robust and easy to use that we’re now using it as a stop gap on many other online projects. It’s compensating for a lot of our web shortcomings.”

On LiveBall’s usability and interface, the client says “I’m a usability person myself. LiveBall is neat, usable and well thought through. It lets us focus on the marketing and on the experiments — on the what rather than the how. We’re now turning around landing pages in any language in 40 minutes. That’s down from four weeks before LiveBall.”

He continues “The real power is in the templates. I was planning to create pages in German. Instead, I ended up calling my colleague in Germany. About 15 minutes into my explanation of LiveBall she asked if she could just use it herself. I gave her access and she had made her first conversion path an hour later. We’re empowering teams around the world that are in close touch with their markets. It lets us focus on the marketing and on studying the behaviors of respondents instead of pages and code — the process stays out of our way.”

In their first few months of using LiveBall, the client has deployed 32 conversion paths fielding traffic from 88 primarily offline sources. Their average segmentation rate of 42.5% has lead to an average conversion rate of 19.5% through September 22, 2008. That conversion rate is over 8X the current global average of 2.2%*.

*Based on the Fireclick index’s global average of 2.2% as of September 22, 2008.

MarketingProfs

Integrated A/B testing increases landing page conversions.

LiveBall has empowered the MarketingProfs marketing team to create elegant, high-performance landing pages. We launch and test pages in minutes and robust minisites within days.
Megan Leap
Online Marketing Manager, MarketingProfs

Click the image above for more landing page examples.

background

MarketingProfs specializes in providing practical, strategic, and tactical marketing tools and know-how for marketing business professionals in organizations worldwide through a full range of online media. MarketingProfs shares their knowledge and engages with a community of more than 430,000 members and 300 contributors.

the challenge

Prior to adopting LiveBall, the MarketingProfs marketing team relied on an in-house landing page tool. The platform did not have easy testing capabilities or a real-time analytics dashboard. Without a way to create, test and optimize landing pages, conversion rates remained stagnant.

the solution

In March 2011, Online Marketing Manager Megan Leap spearheaded the company’s landing page optimization program by choosing LiveBall to replace their proprietary system.

Megan tackled each of MarketingProfs’ business units, creating pages to find big wins across email, PPC and social media campaigns. Within a few weeks, Megan’s lead generation campaigns boasted conversion rates of 20%-50%, depending on the stream of traffic. Email campaign landing pages converted over 50%. The results spoke for themselves: within a few months the program was evangelized to the team of marketing managers within four different business units.

Since the adoption of LiveBall, the MarketingProfs marketing team has created and tested over 330 landing pages, microsites and conversion experiences for lead generation, event promotion, registration and subscription services.

Click the image above for more landing page examples.For Megan, A/B testing and ongoing optimization has made all the difference in MarketingProfs’ online marketing performance. Increased speed to market and subsequent analysis of results has led to improved conversion rates and lower cost-per-acquisition. As Megan explained, “LiveBall has empowered our marketing team to create elegant, high-performance landing pages. We launch and test pages in minutes and robust microsites within days.”

what’s next

What’s next for MarketingProfs? Megan predicts that “…2012 will be a year of tremendous expansion and growth for our landing page optimization program. We will be laser-focused on A/B testing to continue to drive online conversions from all of our marketing channels. In addition to ongoing testing and optimization, we plan on taking advantage of LiveBall’s ready-made widgets to add interactivity and sophistication to our pages.”

Paychex

Using LiveBall & Mongoose Metrics to Track Conversions.

How integrating LiveBall’s landing page management platform with Mongoose Metrics’s call tracking software helped Paychex accurately attribute their online marketing conversions.

We wouldn’t be able to report on the full scope of how much revenue and how many leads paid search is driving without both LiveBall and Mongoose Metrics.”
Jesse Kanclerz
Paychex Search Marketing Analyst

background

Paychex is a recognized leader in the payroll, human resource, and benefits outsourcing industry. They offer an ever-growing variety of payroll and human resource products and services that are customized for each of their clients’ business needs. Paychex helps over half a million small to medium-sized businesses with their HR needs.

a partial view

Paychex is known for their customized services, so even when their prospects start with an online search inquiry, they tend to call just as often as they complete a form. Tracking and optimizing for those phone call leads wasn’t possible with the online advertising management software that Paychex was using, so they added call tracking analytics to their arsenal of tools. However, to see how well an online marketing campaign had truly performed they had to manually piece together performance analytics from two separate software platforms to merge form leads with call leads. Combining the data from the two separate software programs showed that calls ended up representing close to 70% of their leads from paid search advertising. The process of manually merging the two data sources was sure to slow down Paychex’s plans to optimize their online marketing spend through landing page testing.

The marketing team wanted to start a comprehensive testing program to increase both form leads and calls, but without a single, easily accessible view into combined performance analytics their efforts could be wasted because lead attribution would likely be murky. Paychex quickly realized that in order to start running better paid search campaigns they needed the ability to optimize their landing pages based on both phone calls and form submits in a single management platform. They needed a solution that would make it easy to correctly analyze campaign and testing performance so that they could quickly and accurately attribute ROI to the correct marketing campaigns.

solution

Paychex found their solution in LiveBall. LiveBall is cloud-based landing page management software that integrates seamlessly with Mongoose Metrics’s call tracking software. ion’s expert team helped guide the simple integration between the two platforms, so Paychex could track both phone call and lead form conversions in a single view within the LiveBall platform.

seeing the bigger picture

LiveBall tag cloud combining form and phone conversionsUsing LiveBall and Mongoose Metrics, the Paychex marketing team is able to test and optimize over 250 paid search landing pages based on accurate and complete analytics. Without this integration their testing results could be inaccurate, and it would be time-consuming and cumbersome to manually combine data from multiple sources to analyze live tests. Instead, they can now reference a single source to see which pages & campaigns are driving the most calls and form leads. As Jesse Kanclerz, a Paychex Search Marketing Analyst, explained further, “We wouldn’t be able to report on the full scope of how much revenue and how many leads paid search is driving without both LiveBall and integrated call tracking.”

Paychex now has a clear understanding of their overall campaign performance, plus they have discovered specific traffic source insights. For instance, they’ve noticed that they get fewer phone call leads from display ads than they do from search, and that branded keyword terms tend to attract people who prefer to call. These insights are helping them build better landing pages.

Jesse credits LiveBall with making this analysis possible: “LiveBall makes it very easy to segment different sources of traffic compared to free tools where you only see traffic in the aggregate for a test. I know that different sources of traffic have completely different behaviors. With LiveBall, it’s nice to be able to break out and analyze traffic by whatever you want.”

what’s next

Thanks to the LiveBall and Mongoose Metrics integration, Paychex can accurately attribute conversions and they’re ready to launch more tests. They recently started to test a multi-step conversion path versus a microsite for their paid search campaigns. They also plan to start customizing calls to action based on specific traffic source trends that highlight preferences for calling or filling out a form.

SharePoint Solutions

Audience Segmented Landing Pages Result in Smarter Lead Generation

We’ve been able to keep LiveBall through the hard [economic] times because of the success of this program. It has been the #1 source of new subscribers since its implementation in 2009.”
Walt Michksh
SharePoint Solutions Internet Marketing Manager

background

SharePoint Solutions is an enterprise software company that offers 17 solutions across 3 different businesses. They specialize in developing add-on solutions to Microsoft’s Sharepoint software in addition to training and specialized consulting services.

the challenge

SharePoint Solutions offers a library full of free in-depth training videos on their website, but they didn’t have a way to “gate” these valuable, sought-after assets. Gating assets is a common lead generation technique where in order for a visitor to access valuable content they are required to first fill out a form with basic contact information. The SharePoint Solutions team knew that their training videos would be great collateral for their lead generation efforts, so they turned to LiveBall for help.

the solution

SharePoint Solutions adopted LiveBall in 2009. With LiveBall’s code-free platform, they pulled a LiveBall landing page into their site through an iframe. The landing page gives a brief explanation of what their video library offers and then asks visitors to segment into one of three groups (Just Starting, Intermediate, or Advanced) based on their experience with SharePoint. After a visitor self-selects one of the segments, they are taken to a form page that uses language and content offers tailored to their level of experience with SharePoint. Then SharePoint Solutions continues to market to the leads from this campaign through email nurture and drop campaigns.

the results

SharePoint Solutions’ LiveBall landing pages convert on average at 25%, and over 75% of those visitors who convert from a LiveBall page stay on SharePoint Solution’s subscriber list. Since adopting LiveBall three years ago, their LiveBall landing pages have consistently been their number one source of new subscribers.

The LiveBall benefits go beyond just increased conversions. Even if a lead does not submit their information, behavioral data captured within LiveBall – such as a visitor’s segmentation choice – is helping SharePoint Solutions learn even more about their potential customers. As SharePoint Solutions’ Internet Marketing Manager Walt Michksh explains, “segmentation helps us understand what type of people are coming to our pages and gives us the opportunity to qualify leads. Tracking behavior and important actions within the funnel is the key to targeted, relevant email marketing.”

what’s next

SharePoint Solutions wants to learn more about the potential customers who are actively searching for information on their site, and knows that they can get the answers through LiveBall. Using LiveBall, they are creating a “Solution Finder” and a Q&A experience that will point to topic-specific microsites, which they also plan to leverage as “resource” pages for SEO and email marketing.

SurePayroll

Direct marketer acts and acts quickly to optimize paid search and display campaigns with creative landing page design.

LiveBall makes landing pages as fluid as the SEM that drives traffic to them

I’m never married to anything. Whatever gets results in testing is all I’m interested in. With LiveBall, I can try everything easily — without IT — I have total control.”
Scott Brandt
Vice President of Marketing, SurePayroll

Their slogan is “payroll in 1-2-3” and SurePayroll delivers on that promise as the leading online payroll solution for small businesses. When Scott Brandt brought his direct marketing background from Monster to SurePayroll as the Vice President of Marketing he was already a LiveBall convert. Now his ‘test everything’ approach has SurePayroll converting 6.7% of pay-per-click search and display ad traffic into leads. He’s doing it with 169 landing experiences and 220 sources of traffic. Here’s the story Scott told to ion CEO Justin Talerico.

background

Founded in 2000, SurePayroll is the online alternative to ADP® and Paychex®. The company is dedicated to providing a simple, convenient and accurate online payroll service at a price small businesses can afford. SurePayroll revolutionized payroll by introducing the first completely online payroll and payroll tax-filing solution for businesses within 1-100 employees. Since then, they’ve quickly grown into the #1 online payroll company — recognized by industry experts as the top choice for small businesses.

challenge

As is typical in many technology businesses, the IT team developed and maintains SurePayroll.com. The proprietary system allows for rudimentary A/B testing but when SurePayroll’s SEM buys became more and more sophisticated — their website was having a harder and harder time keeping pace. Scott Brandt, VP Marketing says, “as a direct marketer, I’m conditioned to act and act quickly. Our IT people are great, but quarterly releases were too few and far between for the speed of our campaigns. I needed my landing pages to be as fluid as my SEM buys.”

solution

Scott went on to say “I had used LiveBall previously. I knew what it could do. We started by quickly building templates that enabled us to make fast, easy changes.” Scott’s testing strategy was to use the first three quarters of 2009 to test and find landing page design champions that would be optimized for SurePayroll’s critical Q4 period. If all went according to plan, there would be no need for new tests in Q4 — they would simply ride the champions for great results.

Scott says “I’m never married to anything. Whatever gets results in testing is all I’m interested in. With LiveBall, I can try everything easily — without IT — I have total control. LiveBall lets us use automatic optimization to find champions or manually weight alternatives. I like the manual weighting because I like to closely manage the tests. It lets me use my experience combined with the technology to make fast but not rash decisions. I don’t like to waste traffic on poor performers, so LiveBall’s real-time reporting gauges really help me keep the numbers up while I’m challenging champions. I can just take a small percentage of my traffic and route it to the challenger and keep the overall performance high.”

Another important objective of SurePayroll’s program is attribution. LiveBall automatically passes collected lead data to SalesForce in real time. In addition to the data entered into the lead-gen form, LiveBall includes a great deal of system-level data like traffic source, medium, geographic location, behaviors, referrer, keywords, device, and much more. Since all of that can be passed into SalesForce, SurePayroll’s follow-up sales calls can be much more personalized and much more specific to the needs of the prospect.

what’s next?

SurePayroll is currently letting their proven champion landing page design experiences generate great results in their busiest quarter. Going forward, they’re getting even more specific in their attribution — passing into SalesForce which specific search engine ad creative drove the conversion, and ultimately the sale. Scott says “LiveBall gives us all the data we need to optimize our marketing spend from end to end. There’s full transparency and accountability that lets us confidently allocate our budget to the keywords and ads that generate the most impact to our business.”